As of: March 18, 2024, 4:23 p.m
By: Amy Walker
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The debate about citizens' money and work incentives is heating up people's minds.
But how many people actually refuse work?
Berlin - According to the Federal Employment Agency, around 3.9 million people received citizen's benefit in 2023.
Of these, around 1.9 million were classified as unfit for work.
The remaining group is the subject of intense debate, which has intensified in recent weeks and months.
Particularly since the decision to increase citizens' benefits again from 2024, a heated discussion has broken out among German politicians about whether work is still attractive.
Accordingly, the CDU has now submitted its counter-proposal to citizens' money - and wants to completely remove basic security for “total refusers”.
Apart from the fact that the Federal Constitutional Court already decided in 2019 that this is not permissible, the question arises as to how many people such a regulation would affect.
Data for 2022 and 2023 only fragmentary
The Institute for Labor Market and Occupational Research (IAB) collects exactly the data that
was made available to
Ippen.Media for this analysis.
This data shows how often and for what reason the citizen's benefit (or previously Hartz IV) had to be reduced.
However, only fragmentary data is available for 2022 and 2023.
From July 2022 until the new citizen's benefit was fully introduced, there was a moratorium on sanctions, meaning there were very few benefit cuts in order to relieve the burden on job centers when the new system was introduced.
Refusing a job offer was not punished during this period, as were most other breaches of duty.
For the years 2022 and 2023 there is only data for individual months; annual data is available for all other years.
The first important finding is that it is not yet possible to draw a comprehensive picture of citizens' money in comparison to Hartz IV.
There is simply no reliable information about this yet, as a labor market researcher from the IAB confirmed when asked.
“There has been a lot of unrest in recent years, and unfortunately that is also reflected in the statistics,” he said.
Carsten Linnemann wants to revamp citizens' money © IMAGO/Chris Emil Janssen
In 2021, 52,174 cases of benefit reductions were registered due to “refusal to take up or continue work, training, measures or a supported employment relationship”.
This represented almost 27 percent of all benefit cuts this year, but represents a significant decline.
In the first six months of 2022, between 5,245 and 3,712 cases were recorded each month.
In the months of June, July, August and September 2023 there were around 2,000 cases per month, and slightly less in October and November at around 1,600 cases.
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Since 2007, job centers have had to reduce services less and less because someone no longer wanted to accept a job.
While 183,430 cuts were made due to refusal to work in 2007, in the last pre-Corona year of 2019 there were only 82,891.
In 2020, the data recorded a drop to just 18,392 cases, which, according to the IAB, was due to the cancellation of many personal appointments in the job centers in the Corona year.
Of course, this distorts the overall picture.
Citizens’ benefit “total refusers”: A maximum of two percent of all benefit recipients
The second important finding is that fewer and fewer unemployed people have to be sanctioned for refusing to work.
This trend has continued unbroken since 2007.
Between 2007 and 2016, the number of unemployed people also fell continuously, according to figures from the Federal Statistical Office.
The analysis is made more difficult by the fact that the IAB statistics only count cases and not people.
It is therefore possible for a person to reject a job several times and then be recorded in the statistics several times.
It's unclear exactly how many people turn down a job offer.
But even if every single case from 2021 (the last full year) represented one person: 52,000 of a total of 3.9 million citizens' benefit recipients correspond to just 1.3 percent.
If you exclude people who are considered unable to work due to illness or disability, the proportion increases slightly to 2.6 percent.
However, a distinction must be made between the cases in which a new job or new training is actually rejected and those in which the continuation of a job is rejected - for example because the job is not suitable after all - and those in which it is about the rejection of a measure (e.g. application training).
These three different scenarios are recorded together.
In summary, it can be said that only a very small proportion of people in Germany who currently receive a job offer turn it down.